Spatula cooking utensils have been used for a very long time and have been the subject of many efforts to improve the ease of using them to turn or flip food. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,551,877 describes a spatula that will automatically flip food passing through the device.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,601,360 is directed to a spatula with a hinged blade and a spring-biased lever that is said to facilitate flipping of pancakes and hamburgers.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,753,587 describes a spatula having one wall perpendicular to the other to facilitate pickup and flipping of foods from a fry pan.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,024,391 is a flipping spatula with a handle that is angled laterally towards the edge of the spatula.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,676,933; 7,900,329; and 8,613,144 provide a spatula having a solid blade and leading edge sections that can be replaced when the forward edge thereof becomes dulled.
Very few have addressed the issue of friction against the spatula blade. U.S. Pat. No. 1,801,672 describes a pie knife with a thin, flexible blade and a sharpened edge. Openings in the blade are used to increase the flexibility of the blade and reduce sticking.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,796,454 does not address friction but teaches a spatula having removable blades that exhibit different surface recesses for making different types of decorative embossing on pancake surfaces. Such surface recesses would likely increase friction between the blade and the embossed pancake.
Most spatula blades are made of metal or plastic with a tapered leading edge. The planar blade surface may be solid or pierced by one or more circular openings and/or slots that facilitate both cleaning and reduced surface area that might exert frictional or vacuum drag during the loading or unloading of the blade surface. As the amount of pierced surface area increases, however, the blade surface provides correspondingly less surface area for support. For some products (e.g., hamburgers, partially or wholly cooked pancakes, steaks and the like) the food exhibits adequate structural integrity to support its own weight across such gaps without incident or adverse effect.
For delicate foods that lack such structural integrity, e.g., certain types of fish under certain cooking processes, the frictional drag of the blade surface combined with the fluid vacuum drag effects of moist food moving across the blade surface can cause the food to tear and separate. Such adverse effects reduce the appearance of the plated food and can increase the need for caution when plating such products at the expense of kitchen productivity and chef frustration.
Thus, it would be desirable to have a kitchen utensil in the form of a spatula having a blade that exhibited very low friction when loading or unloading food from the surface thereof.
It is also imperative that any kitchen utensil be of a construction and structure to permit the utensil to be cleaned and sterilized. Closed corners and blind pockets can become places where food particles and juices might become trapped and foster the growth of undesirable microbial populations.
It would be, therefore, also desirable to provide a kitchen utensil in the form of a spatula that can be readily cleaned and sterilized.